A Simple Cutting Board

For sometime now my wife and I have need a small cutting board to use in our motor home, so this week I addressed it. This was a really easy project and I'm sure we will get years of great use from it.

I always suggest watching the build video so that you have a better understanding for the project.

For the material I used to make my cutting board I sorted threw my scrap pile finding enough pieces to create the size of board I was after.

I started out by cutting the scraps I was going to use to rough length with the sled on my table saw, then ripped them to rough width

I then ran my rough stock through the planer to clean everything up for glue up.

Now I needed to decide how I wanted to glue these pieces together looking at things like grain and figure, moving the pieces around until I was happy with the way they all came together to create what would be the final board.

Once I had everything laid out to where I was happy with it I was able to apply glue and then put it in clamps and let the glue dry over night.

The next day I removed it from the clamps and after a little clean up I did a couple of light passes through the planer and then cut the board to final dimensions.

After the board was cut to final size, I reset the angle of my table saw blade to about 30 degrees and created a chamfer cut on all four sides to what will be the bottom of the board just for aesthetic purposes.

And after a lot of sanding it was time for a finish. I used a basic Mineral oil applying a heavy coat and letting it soak for a about an hour then wiping the cutting board dry with a paper towel.

Cutting boards can be very simple to build such as the one I built here, or they can be amazing works of art such as the ones built by people like MTM Wood. But whatever it is that you decide to build just have fun doing it and remember to always find time to get out in to your shop and build something awesome.